Last night I drove over to Palm Drive Hospital to join the candle light vigil protesting its closure by its elected Board of Directors. Even though it was 11:30 on a Sunday night it looked to me that over 100 citizens were there. I did not bring paper to make notes, and was holding a candle anyway. But what we were told was important for all of us to know and here are the high points as best I can remember them.
• The Board made the decision to close Palm Drive in a closed session. Such decisions are required by law to be held in open sessions. When reminded they had broken the Brown Act for public meetings one replied “Nobody enforces the Brown Act.” This means their actions were not accidental, they were a deliberate and unapologetic flouting of the law and the people who elected them. What are they hiding?
• Our Police Chief, Fire Chief, and DA all oppose the closure of Palm Drive. When the Board reportedly asked the police to plan on arresting peaceful demonstrators, they were told no way. The DA, Jill Ravitch, said don’t bother, I won’t prosecute.
• Those who know the hospital best, its physicians, believe they can run it on a sustainable basis. They have well over $1 million in funds raised to back them up. The Board argued that these physicians were not capable of providing the level of care that patients needed.
• Many physicians and nurses have made it clear they are willing to work for some weeks free in order to get the hospital up and running again since the actions of the Board are making this task much more expensive than it would be if they acted as genuine supporters of the community and of the people who elected them.
• Doctors and nurses will be providing emergency room service to people who need it from a desk set up in front of the hospital entrance. Other doctors have volunteered their offices nearby for those needing it.
• Many doctors and staff plan to refuse to leave the hospital when it is officially closed at noon, and will stay at their posts. Palm, Drive is a public building, not the property of a lawless Board of Directors serving some instated goal far removed from the well-being of the community that elected them.
• Palm Drive is being terminated when the closure of Hwy 116 at night is in the immediate future. Cal Trans will begin working on improving the bridge, and in the process limit the road to one lane while working. This will add considerably to the time it takes for ambulance service from Santa Rosa. Night time health issues will become much more threatening than day time ones.
• Any one thinking doctors cannot run a hospital because managers have secret skills mere mortals lack need to take a look at the history of worker run enterprises, the closest major example of which is the Alvarado Street Bakery. They generally do better than the corporate suit-run ones. Palm Drive is closing because the Board that mismanaged it is refusing to let anyone else prove it can be done better.
Not every Board member is acting against the interests of the people of Sebastopol and West County, but a majority is. All need to be contacted continually, politely, and incessantly, and urged to do the right thing and adopt ohe physicians’ plan to keep Palm Drive afloat. If they cannot do this they should do us all a service by resigning.
The Board members’ email addresses are:
Nancy Dobbs <[email protected]>
Chris Dawson <[email protected]>
Marsha Sue Lusting <[email protected]>
Sandra Bodley <[email protected]>
Again- the thing we need to do is not aggressively denounce them, one member supports us and another seems to have moved in our direction. From what we were told last night, only one more needs to shift. Community pressure, polite but unrelenting, is what is needed.